Poem by Rick Campbell

Heart

My heart was suspect.
Wired to an EKG,
I walked a treadmill
that measured my ebb
and flow, tracked isotopes
that ploughed my veins,
looked for a constancy
I've hardly ever found.
For a month I worried
as I climbed the stairs
to my office. The mortality
I never believed in
was here now. They
say my heart's ok,
just high cholesterol, but
I know my heart's a house
someone has broken into,
a room you come back
to and know some stranger
with bad intent has been there
and touched all that you love. You know
he can come back. It's his call,
his house now.

New poem (revised)

Remnants

The first Christmas without your mother
thousands of blackbirds darkened the sky
as we drove out of Turlock toward home.

While the radio intoned another
holiday song, crowds of cows bent their lithe
necks to tight water troughs. Brown

horses drifted behind a fence. The blackbirds were
uncountable. They swooped like a massive wing
to the trees, lining the edges of winter-gray limbs,

a child’s primitive drawing of birds perched .
Turning off the radio, you extinguished
the singing beamed from the ether, a rowdy hymn,

then pulled over. We stepped into the silver
dusk. The persistent birds flickered and stirred,
a black agitation of animate leaves,

some whirl of shadowy life. Leaning against
the fence we watched, half waiting for a synchronized
lift-off. Two horses came to the fence from

the cold pasture, leaned their heads into our hands.
We received white puffs of breath, their fur
stiff beneath our fingers. An ebony cloud,

the birds finally lifted in concert, hovered,
then landed again in the trees. Your mother
once was a child in a farm house nearby. Now

her body lies in the black ground in the town
graveyard, buried four months ago after two
years in bed. You told me the other day you

don't know what to do, who you are--now
that your mother is gone. Now that caring for her
is an energy unfulfilled. Now that breathing

is easy. The miracle swirl of birds lifts
again, swoops, then alights. Then again and again,
as though now a habit. The horses are getting too

joyful for our touch. It’s time to leave this slow
town, to weave together the remnants of holiday
in our warm home. Driving the dusky road,

we see at the town limit two men hauling oranges
to their truck, done for the day. We stop, keep
the engine running and buy two bags, just for the glow.